Straight Man

on our sixtieth birthdays this year were offered early retirement incentives last summer?”
    I do vaguely recall. If memory serves, Billy Quigley had briefly considered the offer.
    “Well, last week I called personnel to say I might be interested. Guess what I found out?”
    “The offer’s been withdrawn?”
    He nods.
    “For everyone in that situation?”
    “I don’t know. But for me, the offer is no longer on the table.”
    “So you think they’re considering even more economical methods now?”
    “That’s what I think. Also, I’m not sure I have the unqualified support of my dean. He’s wished for a long time that I didn’t have quite so much to offer women.”
    Which makes me wonder if Tony would have my unqualified support if I were dean. “And you think your department has a list?”
    He’s looking me in the eye now. “I think every department has a list. I think English has a list. I’ve heard for a fact that English has a list.”
    “And you heard I drew up this list?”
    “I heard there was a list.”
    At the register I pay for my dinner and Tony’s. He pays for June’s and Teddy’s. I tell him I’m going to make a stop at the men’s room. He offers to wait, but he looks exhausted, bottomed out, and since I may be a while, I tell him to go on home. On a night like this, a man like me fears the truth before he knows it. After my soul-cleansing, chino-soilingpee this afternoon, I’ve returned to dribble mode. I had hoped, of course, that a man who could fill an office swivel chair with urine at five o’clock in the afternoon might be able to relieve himself sensibly at midnight, but I find that I am again backed up, painfully, angrily.
    Outside, snow. As predicted. Even so, amazing.
    It has only just started when I emerge from the restaurant, but it’s coming down heavy in wet, thick flakes. The spot where Tony’s car was parked is already white. Chances are, if it’s snowing like this here in Railton, it’s coming down even harder in Allegheny Wells, which is higher up.
    At the bottom of Pleasant Street Hill I pull off to the side at the gravel entrance to the railyard and watch another car, the only one I’ve seen since leaving the restaurant, make the long, steep ascent. Halfway up, the car begins to lose traction and the rear end drifts sideways as the wheels spin, but it makes the first plateau, where it stops, as if to summon courage and steel resolve, its brake lights glowing anxious red. It remains there too long though, and I begin to suspect that the car’s driver and I are soul mates. “Now what?” I say out loud, and only when I hear the words spoken does the left blinker come on. Then the car turns into the intersection, inching slowly away from further confrontation. My soul mate gone, I turn my attention to the dark railyard, its flat landscape interrupted here and there by the black silhouettes of boxcars. What they remind me of, strangely, is an urban skyline, except that would mean that the entire city was belowground, only the very tops of its rectangular buildings poking up through the snow. Seen so fancifully, the world tilts and with it my stomach. I close my eyes, and my mother’s words find me across the long decades. “We will forget this,” she assures me.
    Somehow we, or at least I, have managed to remain faithful to that promise. How long was it after my father left before it became clear to me, if not to my mother, that he wasn’t coming back? A year or so in my memory, but it may have been far less. We were still in the same rented university house, which means the year’s lease had not run out. So, perhaps only a few months. With him gone, the house had become engulfed in silence. Strange, since my father was a reader and a writer,and the house was always kept quiet for these sensible pursuits. My mother was a reader too, but I always had the impression that it was my father we were keeping quiet for. But apparently not, because now, with no William Henry Devereaux, Sr., to consider, the house was more deeply, eerily silent than before. After school I became the denizen of its dark, dank cellar, from which my mother always had to call me for dinner. What did I do down there? she always wanted to know. I remember there was no way to explain.
    The house, situated at the outer edge of the campus, had recently been purchased by the university, which was buying adjacent property to ensure the possibility of future expansion. In fact, the house we